Ben: >I accept that many others have differing opinions, but I personally feel >that the "germ" or "contagious" theory is just a scare tactic to push us >into an endless cycle of vaccination, antibiotics, and other drugs that will >never benefit our long-term health one bit. Simply trying to kill >everything in our food to avoid disease is much like shooting a crowing >rooster to stop the sun from coming up. Hi, Ben, and welcome to raw-food. So the idea here is that some group of powerful people just really likes "vaccination, antibiotics, and other drugs" and they are trying to scare us by inventing the scare tactic of germ/contagion theory? :/ While I ain't much of a conspiracy kinda guy, I do admit to noticing how tidy it is that a slew of media attention to the evils of germs has coincided with the inways that irradiation has made in the last months. No doubt drug companies and the irradiation folks have a vested interest in the paradigm of "scary germs", BUT the germ theory predates these folks--they didn't invent it as a ruse to do devilish things to us earthlings. They may well be exploiting folks fear of germs, but they didn't sit around a table and invent it from scratch. ;) As limited as the (narrow-minded) "germ theory of disease" is, I think replacing it with the (narrow-minded) "germ theory of health" might be un-useful. There are plenty of examples of serious rawists having trouble with parasites, bacterial and viral infections which are not self-terminating, which would probably have been life-threatening if medications were not finally used. Many of these instances have been discussed on this list (along with Price's and Schmid's work). Further, wild animals have their share of trouble with disease--not to the degree that domesticated animals to, of course, but it is not a non-issue for wild animals. Non-industrial and pre-ag peoples have lots of experience with parasites, even among tribes which are as "pristine" as those studied by Price. Indeed, one criticism I've heard of Price's work is that he ignored the diseases which he encountered among the peoples on his travels because they often weren't the "western diseases". Parasites are an issue for nearly every culture that I have studied, whether SADers or wild chimp populations. You would propbably be interested in searching the archives of this list to find out the kinds of previous chatter which has been bandied about regarding these issues. Cheers, Kirt